Akira is a total trip as well.

There’s been a live action Akira film in development hell for over 20 years now. I’ve been patiently waiting since my teen years to see it and I’m in my early 40s now. I guess directors are so scared of not being able to live up to the masterpiece that is the original anime film, so nobody sticks with the project long.

Personally, I’d love to see it recreated as a miniseries. If you’ve read the manga, the film barely touches on the plot. There are gang wars, political factions, economic and social collapse, insurrections and riots, even global wars! None of that is covered in the film; they just focus on Tetsuo and Kaneda.

Heck, even its namesake, Akira, isn’t around! He was a central figure of the manga, but he’s only around for some brief flashbacks in the film.

A miniseries would give it time to world-build and cover everything in the original manga series.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.

I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

I mean, in that political circle, he’s highly respected. Just not with the people of the “kingdom.”

If we’re dressing them like kings, I feel the last one should be a jester, not a clown.

Hobbies are about enjoyment, not skill. You should never measure your accomplishments with hobbies based on how good you are at them.

That said… when I was younger, I only indulged in hobbies that I had any skill in. If I sucked at something, I typically gave it up quickly and looked for something else to do.

Video games were an exception. I enjoyed the gameplay so much, it didn’t matter that I was awful at them. I’d grind the same levels over and over, hoping to finally beat it this time.

Interestingly enough, I’m actually really good at video games now. Not professionally so, but I have a lot more skill than most of my friends. I’m usually appointed team leader in any co-op games I play with my friends because I’m really good at tracking the mission objective and keeping everyone together. And now that I’m retired young, I spend a lot of time gaming throughout the days, which only makes me better.

I don’t play games for the challenge or skill, though. I mostly play to enjoy an interactive story. So I usually turn the difficulty down to the easiest option so I don’t get stuck from progression at any point. I can handle really difficult games, but I just don’t want to. Unless my friends want a challenge, then I’ll crank it up and then be constantly bailing them out from the nightmare they chose to play.

Helldivers II is very popular right now, and that game is basically a comedic over-the-top parody of Starship Troopers (the movie, not the book). If the studio has any sense about them, they’ll remake the film in the vein of Helldivers and not actual imperialist military propaganda like the book.

Starship Troopers 2 is the first and only movie I’ve ever walked out on, and only because I kept falling asleep watching it. To this day, I still haven’t watched the whole thing. Such an awful movie.

I read a synopsis of the entire plot at some point and I remember the ending being super unsatisfying, which further discourages me from ever watching it.

I must’ve been tired last night… I stared at this meme for so long, not able to make any sense of it. What does the Cold War have to do with refrigerators?! I finally put down my tablet and went to sleep.

This morning I picked up my tablet, saw this meme again, and immediately thought, “Oh, the COLD war.” Duh.

A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.

If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.

I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.

I saw the “Women in Metal” title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

According to the rest of the world, the US doesn’t have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

That’s why there’s a whole movement centered around “no war but class war.” The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake “red vs. blue” distraction so we don’t actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

SQL is the language. Its name is also an acronym, for “Structured Query Language.”

They’re both acronyms, so yes? You always write acronyms in upper case.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

Some exceptions to the rule exist, like “Database” is usually abbreviated as Db in acronyms. For instance, IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

Although considering database is a singular word, it makes sense to lower-case the middle letter of the word, as it wouldn’t be capitalized in the spelled-out word anyway.

EDIT: On a related note (and one that will really show my age), I always capitalize the i in “Internet.”

When I was a kid, and before the Internet was publicly accessible, we referred to a collection of internetworked computers as an “internet.”

Then the “World Wide Web” (WWW) became a big deal in the mid-'90s, which was the first publicly accessible internet of computers and servers. It was super primitive and took like 10 minutes just to load a small image on a mostly-text webpage. We referred to this new global internet as “The Internet.” This was the biggest and most ambitious attempt at building an interconnected series of computers, so we called it The Internet (capital “i”) to differentiate it from a regular internet.

Fast forward several decades… for so long, the Internet has been such a commonly used term to refer to the World Wide Web. It’s completely taken over the word; we don’t really refer to small computer networks as internets anymore. So there’s no point in differentiating between the two.

But I remember, and I still keep up the old habit of capitalizing when I’m referring to THE Internet, versus a smaller network of computers.

I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.

I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.

Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

Personally, I prefer this comparison:

Reminds me of this article I read yesterday:

Adopt a Red State: How Democrats Can Expose Republican Cowards

Glad to see Tim Walz is taking this approach.

40-yr old male here, been retired since I was 38. (Collecting a military pension, plus 100% VA disability benefits) I’m usually awake until around 4-6 AM, then sleep until either noon or 1 PM. Unless I’m having a night of PTSD-induced insomnia, which strikes randomly. In which case, I might be awake until 10-11 AM, then crash for the rest of the day.

I’m a night owl and am at my most productive at night. Then I go to bed and usually don’t set an alarm so I can wake up naturally. After I wake, I might lie in bed for another hour or two, catching up on news or social media on my tablet. Then I’ll shower, grab some food, then plan out my day from there.

I’m drowning in hobbies and interests, and I have ADHD, which makes me hyperfocus on a dozen detailed tasks all at once. So there’s never a shortage of things to do each day. But I also don’t feel the need to be accomplished every day. Some days, you just need a day to rest and do nothing.

My first car was a 1991 Honda Ascot. I bought it in 2003 in Japan, when I was stationed there with the US military. I bought it off a fellow service member who was leaving the country, for $1,000. I gave it to another service member for free when I bought a better car a year later.